Then and Now: 120 Bioeconomy Pioneers look at yesterday, today, inspirations and challenges

Michael Theroux

Then: ”I was nearing the end of a five year appointment by the Los Angeles County Integrated Waste Management Task Force, as an independent technical/regulatory advisor to their Alternative Technology Assessment Subcommittee. We were focused on the international technologies and methods enabling clean waste conversion to commodities, vetting over 400 such systems and lapping the globe in ‘kicking tires’.

Concurrently, I held a contract to assess the impact of recently changed PURPA regulations on the biomass to energy market, surveying the ‘wood chip supply chain’ status along the western face of the Sierra Nevada mountain range as that market collapsed.

With the knowledge from my Task Force work an a deep understanding of both municipal waste and forest residuals, I then began attempting to develop small waste / biomass conversion projects in the western states.”

Now:  “After setting aside my ‘Teru Talk’ news service last year, I again began focusing on project development. I have pulled a solid team together and we are proposing energy and resource recovery developments to integrate food / food waste supply chain optimization with organic residuals conversion. Our target market: Tribal casino / hotel complexes and their surrounding communities. We have added the technical design element of relatively small scale anaerobic digestion systems to energy / resource recovery integration of restaurants, hotels, greenhouses and organic food supply management.

Concurrently, I am beginning to understand how the single wettest year on record for Sacramento, California, is impacting my salmon and steelhead fishing along the American River … or should I say, ‘non-fishing’. Whew, what a lot of water!”

Inspirations: We now have a great assortment of community-scale technologies and methods whereby we can effectively stop throwing our resources away, then paying to keep them buried. This is especially true for conversion of organic residuals back into useful, valuable commodities, putting things back into our global supply chain instead of depending on supply chain ‘off-ramps’.

Add to this our rapid growth in human understanding and technical capacity to work with Big Data. The magnitude of change that is needed demands that we implement a truly Circular Economy on a global scale, and that much information requires efficient, thorough data management and analysis.”

Challenges: : “It often seems that all the simple problems have already been solved, and we are communally left with such an unapproachable Gorgon’s Knot of inter-related challenges. But that is indeed the nature of our Society; all too often we witness an overly-cautious approach underlain by an unwillingness to tackle the actual scale and the complexity of our lives and that of the planet we depend upon. Easy fixes, don’t.”